Challenging year (for time), building upfit, plans, & Patreon shipments (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

First: Patreon shipments just got sent to distribution. Those will ship out this coming week for reward tiers. Thanks for your patience. The delay is just on me for trying to keep up.

Second: People regularly ask for a link to Discord for Patreon. If you want to join and haven't yet, please follow these instructions: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212052266-Get-my-Discord-role

I've been slammed nonstop with construction projects on the new space for a few months now, so it's been tough to juggle normal uploads, the build-out, and everything else. We're doing a good job, I think. I'm relying on the team a lot right now to try and fill gaps where possible. I wanted to give an update on everything we're working on, plus some behind the scenes.

Time Challenges

This past year has been a huge challenge for me with timing. Normally, convention travel and conventions help do a few primary things:

1. They keep me personally motivated, as well as most the people on the team. Conventions are a massive competitive adrenaline kick to try and be first and best to cover everything, and outside of conventions, things like our factory tours are just a good break from regular (very hard-fought) content. Factories are also challenging, but for different reasons. We can turn through 1-2 factory tours a day, whereas a review might take a week or 3. That's because we're relying on experts to inform us, so it mostly falls on us to take good notes and ask good questions. At my experience level, that part is relatively easy. Factory tours are also just really invigorating because they show us cool stuff and give us new experiences and new places to go.

2. Travel is a great way to sort of "wake up" and snap-out of anything monotonous from the daily push. I love Taiwan specifically and have felt basically "homesick" for it for about a year now. It's been a second home to me since I discovered it and I can't wait to go back.

3. Conventions give us easy content, but important content: News videos are key around conventions, and doing 4-5x 8-minute videos per day during Computex and CES is a huge amount of fun and not the same type of work as MASSIVELY refining some 30-minute review. In one day of CES of Computex, we can sometimes make up to 8x 5-10 minute videos, all of which go live within a 36-hour period. It takes us a day to EDIT (not counting writing, testing, filming) a single 30-minute video for a normal review at home base. That should give perspective on what conventions are like reinforcements -- it's easy, fun, punchy, informative content that helps keep us excited about new tech without killing us. In-depth review-style uploads are hard to maintain at our quality and pace, but we're doing it.

The result of losing convention travel from COVID took a while to materialize for me, but it eventually did. We've had to stay very creative and we've had to self-motivate nonstop since this all started. I can self-motivate well -- that's why we're where we are -- but it's tough to do that without any external stimulus from meeting industry people, peers, engineers far smarter than us, and seeing new sights. We're doing it, and it's going well, but it's very tiring.

All of that said: My biggest challenge this past year has been just managing time. Our video standards are nearly unsustainably high right now, but we've been able to keep it together by implementing some more quality checks in the pipeline by the rest of the team. That has helped. I've also been tied-up in managing things as simple as picking door knobs for a suite build-out, or choosing what color of carpet we want, so it's easy to see where countless hours feel wasted every week. I want it done right and I'm not willing to task that out, because the building upfit is probably the single most important or expensive thing I'm going to do in the next decade. It's also a one-shot thing -- we won't have to do this again for a long time once it's done. Once that's all over with, hopefully it gets easier.

On the personal side, for anyone who cares: For now, I've only done one biking trip this year, and I really want to do some more. I've normally done 3-4 by now, but again, time is limited with the upfit and with the lack of travel content from COVID. I have added a lot of workouts to keep awake throughout the week and am finally trending a bit healthier, but I miss the bike trips a lot. Hopefully I'll have some soon. I've met a few of you at parks and that's always a blast.

Content Pipeline

Right now, we've just finished a review of a $70 budget airflow case with more than 4 fans (won't specify to not spoil it!), we have the Gigabyte exploding PSU piece done (Patrick Stone did that one) and it just needs my proofreading and input for some sections, we have some embargoed products we can't talk about, and we have the Corsair 7000D review done and ready to go live this weekend.

I really need to find some time to get the streaming machine working again to do some livestreams.

Oh, and Alienware is probably the most insane company in the prebuilt space. Our review of their system is also done and only need a final QC pass and some edits from me, then it'll be ready to go.

The past 12 months have been crazy. I've enjoyed it and I think we are managing very well, and our position has improved and our tools and talents have as well, but I also am looking forward to a reduction in workload. For the past few weeks, if I haven't been in the office, it has basically meant I'm sleeping, taking a food break, or getting an hour of exercise, but that's about it. Normally I have a few more hours than that to do other stuff.

Anyway, overall, things are looking great for end of year: My construction management (just choices of things, we obviously have professional architects and contractors involved) should be over in the next few months and we'll start getting shipments of insanely cool equipment. I'm really excited for it. We have the automated fan testing machine coming in -- one of the same ones that Noctua and Corsair use for R&D -- and we'll be working on spec-ing out a thermal chamber next. I've also been looking at salt spray testers for water block testing. They are, compared to the fan tester, much more affordable -- but probably less useful to us. I'll think about it.

We're all excited about the new space and can't wait to get to work. I have taken a lot of pride in trying to make sure our channel continues its trajectory of getting more and more technical, not less, as time goes on. I think we can make it work and still reach the audience we need to reach without sacrificing quality at all.

I'm excited.

Thanks, everyone.

- Steve